Avoiding hospital in pandemic increased heart disease deaths: Study.

• Position: Report

ISLAMABAD -- Reduced hospital visits for urgent heart problems during the initial phase of the Covid-19 pandemic may have contributed to hundreds of avoidable deaths, new research has found.

In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, a marked decline inpatient visits to emergency departments (EDs) was observed in England and the US, including for people with heart problems.

In this study, published online in the journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, researchers at University College London's Institute of Health Informatics estimated the effect of reduced emergency departments visits for suspected cardiac disease on non-Covid-19 related cardiac mortality in England, Medical Daily reported .

The researchers estimated that the excess cardiac mortality due to non-attendance at Emergency Departments, during the initial phase of the pandemic, may have been as high as 232 deaths per week.

To quantify the number of excess deaths due to cardiac disease, the team used mortality counts from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) for England.

To quantify the change in daily ED visits, researchers used data from the Public Health England (PHE) Emergency Department Syndromic Surveillance System (EDSSS): a network of sentinel EDs across England.

To explore how the reduction in ED visits may have affected...